Rem Koolhaas Junkspace (2001)

Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a life-long immersion in arbitrariness... The average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of junkspace: a fervent semantics of health - slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of goat cheese - cancelled by a colossal cookie at the bottom... Polarities have become equatorial, nothing left in between. There is nothing between desolation and turmoil, between beauty and crassness. LAX: welcoming - possibly flesh-eating - orchids at the check-in counter...

'Identity' is the new junkfood for the disposessed, globalization's fodder for the disenfranchized.

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-out. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory... Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th...

It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the 20th century; architecture disappeared in the 20th century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People's Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish,echo)... Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since the beginning of time; but air conditioning - invisible medium, therefore unnoticed - has truly revolutionized architecture. Air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them. Air conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single shopping center now is the work of generations of space planners, repairmen and fixers, like in the middle ages; air conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (Unwittingly, all architects may be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will eventually make it cohere.) Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into junkspace.

When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. OK, let's talk about space then. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations. The subtlety of the shopping center. Let's explore public space, discover casinos, spend time in theme parks... Junkspace is the body-double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of concepts, a petri dish abandoned: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It substitutes hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction... Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends... A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever...

Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small shiny space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams deliver cyclopic burdens to innocent destinations... The arch, once the workhorse of structures, has become the depleted emblem of 'community', welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to non-existent there's. Where it is absent, it is simply applied - mostly in stucco - as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks. 13% of all junkspace's iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan...

Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific configuration is as furtuitous as the geometry of a snow flake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code... Because it cannot be grasped, junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly non-architectural, it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Sections seem to be devoted to utter inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The aesthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split-seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace's modules are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: essences through which meaning disappears... The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind reflect humanity at its most casual. The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to dress down. A stringent dress code - last spasm of etiquette? - governs access to junkspace: short, sneaker, sandal, shell suit, fleece, jean, parka, backpack. As if the People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, junkspace is best enjoyed in a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between desolation and turmoil. Neon signifies both the old and the new, interiors refer to the stone- and the space age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an innoculation, Modern architecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech (it seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress, exit stairs dangle in didactic trapeze, probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air, acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid events. Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the sound of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic, in three years segue into Nigerian Sixties, Norwegian Chalet or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque.

Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in junkspace. There is no form, but proliferation... Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation... Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infrastructures of light, LED's, and video describe an authorless world beyond anyone's claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar. Junkspace is hot (or suddenly artic); fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass, generate additional heat to raise the temperature of junkspace to levels where you could cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stable, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs for a vacant shell... Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be modified at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary and standardized; substance now comes predigitized... As the module becomes smaller and smaller, its status become that of a crypto-pixel. With enormous difficulty - budget, argument, negotiation, deformation - irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements. Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque now is wrested from the homogenized, the singular liberated from the standardized.
Architects thought of junkspace first and named it Megastructure, the final solution to transcend their huge impasse. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent infill that would mutate over time, beyond their control. In theory, each megastructure would spawn its own sub-systems, and therefore create a universe of rampant cohesion. In junkspace, the tables are turned: it is subsystems only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of framework or pattern. All materialization is provisional: cutting, bending, tearing, coating: construction has aquired a new softness, like tailoring...The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: transitional moments are defined by stapling and taping, wrinkly brown bands barely maintain the illusion of an unbroken surface; verbs unknown and unthinkable in architectural history - clamp, stick, fold, dump, glue, shoot, double, fuse - have become indispensable. Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation. Where once detailing suggested the coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation; no longer the orchestrated encounter of difference, but the abrupt end of a system, a stalemate. Only the blind, reading its faultlines with their fingertips, will ever understand junkspace's histories...
While whole millenia worked in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships and proportion, the program of junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers entropy. Because it is endless, it always leaks somewhere in junkspace; in the worst case, monumental ashtrays catch intermittent drops in a grey broth. When did time stop moving forward... begin to spool in every direction, like a tape spinning out of control? Since the introduction of Real Time? Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture wobbles endlessly sideways... Junkspace is draining and is drained in return. Everywhere in junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience junkspace offers its consumers is significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation; in its most abandoned stretches, you find buffets: utilitarian tables draped in white or black sheets, perfunctory assemblies of caffeine and calories - cottage cheese, muffins, unripe grapes - notional representations of plenty, without horn and without plenty. Each junkspace is connected, sooner or later, to bodily functions: wedged between stainless steel partitions sit rows of groaning Romans, denim togas bunched around their huge sneakers...
Because it is so intensely consumed, junkspace is fanatically maintained, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphian replay. As you recover from junkspace, junkspace recovers from you: between 2 and 5 am, yet another population, this one heartlessly casual and appreciably darker, is mopping, hovering, sweeping, toweling, resupplying... Junkspace does not inspire loyalty in its cleaners... Dedicated to instant gratification, junkspace accomodates seeds of future perfection; a language of apology is woven through its texture of canned euphoria; 'pardon our appearance' signs or miniature yellow 'sorry' billboards mark ongoing patches of wetness, announce momentary discomfort in return for imminent shine, the allure of improvement. Somewhere, workers sink on their knees to repair faded sections - as if in a prayer - or half-disappear in ceiling voids to negotiate elusive malfunction - as if in confession. All surfaces are archaeological, superpositions of different 'periods' (what do you call the moment a particular type of wall-to-wall carpet was current?) - as you note when they're torn.

Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the definition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity, less about kind than about quantity. But formlessness is still form, the formless also a typology... take the dump, where successive trucks discharge their loads to form a heap, whole in spite of the randomness of its contents and its fundamental shapelessness, or that of the tent-envelope that assumes different shapes to accomodate variable interior volumes. Or the vague crotches of the new generation. Junkspace can either be absolutely chaotic or frighteningly aseptic - like a bestseller - overdetermined and indeterminate at the same time. There is something strange about ballrooms, for instance: huge wastelands kept column free for ultimate flexibility. Because you've never been invited to that kind of event, you have never seen them in use, only being prepared with chilling precision: a relentless grid of circular tables, extending towards a distant horizon, their diameters preempting communication, a dais big enough for the politburo of a totalitarian state, wings announcing as-yet unimagined surprises... acres of organization to support future drunkenness, disarray and disorder. Or car shows.

Junkspace is often described as a space of flows, but that is a misnomer; flows depend on disciplined movement, bodies that cohere. Junkspace is a web without spider; although it is an architecture of the masses, each trajectory is strictly unique. Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom. It is a space of collision, a container of atoms, busy, not dense... There is a special way of moving in junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful. It is an acquired culture. Junkspace features the tyranny of the oblivious: sometimes an entire junkspace comes unstuck through the non-conformity of one of its members; a single citizen of an another culture - a refugee, a mother - can destabilize an entire junkspace, hold it to a rustic's ransom, leaving an invisible swath of obstruction in his/her wake, a deregulation eventually communicated to its furthest extremities. Where movement becomes synchronized, it curdles: on escalators, near exits, parking machines, automated tellers. Sometimes, under duress, individuals are channeled in a flow, pushed through a single door or forced to negotiate the gap between two temporary obstacles (an invalid's bleeping chariot and a christmas tree): the manifest ill-will such narrowing provokes, mocks the notion of flows. Flows in junkspace lead to disaster: department stores at the beginning of sales, the stampedes triggered by warring compartments of soccer fans, dead bodies piling up in front of the locked emergency doors of a disco: evidence of the misfit between the portals of junkspace and the narrow calibrations of the old world. Traffic is junkspace, from airspace to the underground; the entire highway system is junkspace, a vast potential utopia clogged by its users, as you notice when they've finally disappeared on vacation. The young instinctively avoid the Dantesque manipulations/containers to which junkspace has condemnded their elders in perpetuity. Within the meta-playground of junkspace exist smaller playgrounds, junkspace for children (usually in the least desirable square footage): sections of sudden miniaturization - often underneath staircases, always near dead-ends - assemblies of under-dimensioned plastic structures - slides, see-saws, swings - shunned by their intended audience - kids - turned into junkniche for the old, the lost, the forgotten, the insane... last hiccup of humanism...

Like radioactive waste, junkspace has an invidious half-life. Aging in junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire junkspace - a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad - turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes almost imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable, but remain joined to the flesh of the main body via gangrenous passages. Judging the built presumed a static condition; now each architecture embodies opposite conditions simultaneously: old and new, permanent and temporary, flourishing and at risk... sections undergo an Alzheimer-like deterioration as others are upgraded. Because junkspace is endless, it is never closed... Renovation and restauration were procedures that took place in your absence; now you're a witness, a reluctant participant... Seeing junkspace in conversion is like inspecting an unmade bed, someone else's. Say an airport needs more space. In the past new terminals were added, each more or less characteristic of its own age, leaving the old ones as a readable record, evidence of progress. Since passengers have definitively demonstrated their infinite malleability, the idea of rebuilding on the spot has gained currency. Travelators are thrown in reverse, signs taped, potted palms (or very large corpses) covered in body bags. Screens of taped sheetrock segregate two populations: one wet, one dry, one hard, one flabby, one cold, one overheated. Half the population produces new space, the more affluent half consumes old space. To accommodate a nether world of manual labor, the concourse suddenly turns into cashbah: improvised locker rooms, coffee breaks, smoking, even real campfires... The ceiling is a crumpled plate like the Alps; grids of unstable tiles alternate with monogrammed sheets of black plastic, improbably punctured by grids of crystal chandeliers... Metal ducts are replaced by breathing textiles. Gaping joints reveal vast ceiling voids (former canyons of asbestos?), beams, ducting, rope, cable, insulation, fireproofing, string; tangled arrangements suddenly exposed to daylight. Impure, tortured and complex, they exist only because they were never consciously plotted. The floor is a patchwork: different textures - concrete, hairy, heavy, shiny, plastic,metallic, muddy - alternate randomly, as if dedicated to different species...The ground is no more. There are too many raw needs to be realized on only one plane. The absolute horizontal has been abandoned. Transparency has disappeared, replaced by a dense crust of provisional occupation: kiosks, carts, strollers, palms, fountains, bars, sofas, trolleys... Corridors no longer simply link A to B , but have become 'destinations'. Their tenant life tends to be short: the most stagnant windows, the most perfunctory dresses, the most implausible flowers. All perspective is gone, as in a rainforest (itself disappearing, they keep saying...). The formerly straight is coiled into ever more complex configurations. Only a perverse modernist choreography can explain the twists and turns, ascents and descents, sudden reversals that comprise the typical path from check-in (misleading name) to apron of the average contemporary airport. Because we never reconstruct or question the absurdity of these enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles...

There was once a polemic about the straight line; now the 90-degree angle has become one among many. In fact, remnants of former geometries create ever new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of resistance that create unstable eddies in newly opportunistic flows...Who would dare claim responsibiliy for this sequence? The idea that a profession once dictated, or at least presumed to predict, people's movements, now seems laughable, or worse: unthinkable. Instead of design, there is calculation: the more erratic the path, eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, the more efficient the exposure, inevitable the transaction. In this war, graphic designers are the great turncoats: where once signage promised to deliver you to where you wanted to be, it now obfuscates and entangles you in a thicket of cuteness that forces you past unwanted detours, turns you back when you're lost. Postmodernism adds a crumple-zone of viral poche that fractures and multiplies the endless frontline of display, a peristaltic shrinkwrap crucial to all commercial exchange. Trajectories are launched as ramp, turn horizontal without any warning, intersect, fold down, suddenly emerge on a vertiginous balcony above a large void. Fascism minus dictator. From the sudden dead-end where you were dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. (There is no datum level; you always inhabit a sandwich. 'Space' is scooped out of junkspace as from a soggy block of ice cream that has languished too long in the freezer: cylindrical, cone shaped, more or less spherical, whatever...) Toilet groups mutate into Disney Store then morph to become meditation center: succesive transformations mock the word 'plan'. The plan is a radar screen where individual pulses survive for unpredictable periods of time in a Bachanalian free-for-all... In this stand-off between the redundant and the inevitable, a plan would actually make matters worse, drive you to instant despair. Only the diagram gives a bearable version. There is zero loyalty - and zero tolerance - toward configuration, no 'original' condition, architecture as has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a 'permanent evolution'... The only certainty is conversion - continuous - followed, in rare cases, by 'restoration'. That is the process that claims ever new sections of history as extensions of junkspace.

History corrupts, absolute history corrupts absolutely. Color and matter are eliminated from these bloodless grafts: the bland has become the only meeting ground for the old and the new... Can the bland be amplified? The featureless be exaggerated? Through height? depth? length? variation? repetition? Sometimes not overload but its opposite, an absolute absence of detail, generates junkspace. A voided condition of frigthening sparseness, shocking proof that so much can be organized by so little. Laughable emptiness infuses the respectful distance or tentative embrace that starchitects maintain in the presence of the past, authentic or not. Invariably, the primordial decision is to leave the original intact; the formerly residual is declared the new essence, focus of the intervention. As a first step, the substance to be preserved is wrapped in a thick pack of commerce and catering - like a reluctant skier pushed downhill by responsible minders. To show respect, symmetries are maintained and helplessly exaggerated; ancient building techniques are resurrected and honed to irrelevant shine, quarries reopened to excavate the 'same' stone, indiscreet donor names chiseled prominently in the meekest of typefaces; the courtyard covered by a masterful, structural 'filigree' - emphatically uncompetitive - so that continuity may be established with the 'rest' of junkspace (abandoned galleries, display slums, jurrasic concepts...). Conditioning is applied; filtered daylight reveals vast, antiseptic expanses of monumental reticence and makes them come alive, vibrant as a computer rendering... the curse of public space: latent fascism safely smothered in signage, stools, sympathy... Junkspace is post-existential; it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were. Who do you think you are? Who do you want to be ? (Note to architects: you thought that you could ignore junkspace... visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously... because you could not understand it, you've thrown away the keys... but now your own architecture is infected, has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy, atrium-ridden...) JunkSignature(TM) is the new architecture: the former megalomania of a profession contracted to managable size, junkspace minus its saving vulgarity. Anything stretched - limousines, body parts, planes - turns into junkspace, its original concept abused. Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return - the Parthenon marbles - redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-, producejunkspace.

Junkspace will be our tomb. Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume. The combined pollution of all Third World cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses, sweatshops, pales into insignificance compared to the heat generated by junkspace. Junkspace is political: it depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure. Politics has become manifesto by Photoshop, seamless blueprints of the mutually exclusive. Rabbit is the new beef. Comfort is the new Justice. Entire miniature states now adopt junkspace as political program, establish regimes of engineered disorentation, instigate a politics of systematic disarray. Not exactly 'anything goes'; in fact, the secret of junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse. Babel has been misunderstood. Language is not the problem, just the new frontier of junkspace. Mankind, torn by eternal dilemmas, the impasse of seemingly endless debates, has launched a new language that straddles unbridgable divides like a fragile pedestrian designer's footbridge... coined a proactive wave of new oxymorons to suspend former incompatibility: life/style, reality/TV, world/music, museum/store, food/court, health/care, waiting/lounge. Naming has replaced class-struggle, sonorous amalgamations of status, high-concept and history. Through acronym, unusual importation, suppressing letters, or fabrication of non-existent plurals, they aim to shed meaning in return for a spatious new roominess... Junkspace knows all your emotions, all your desires. It is the interior of Big Brother's belly. It preempts people's sensations. It comes with a soundtrack, smell, captions; it blatantly proclaims how it wants to be read: rich, stunning, cool, huge, abstract, 'minimal', historical. It sponsors a collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend, a mass of refractory periods caught in a Thousand Year Reign of Razzmataz, a paroxysm of prosperity. The subject is stripped of privacy in return for access to a credit nirvana. You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are. Emissaries of junkspace pursue you in the formerly impervious privacy of the bedroom: the minibar, private fax machines, pay TV offering compromised pornography, fresh plastic veils wrapping toilets seats, courtesy condoms: miniature profit centers coexist with your bedside bible...

Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not of shared interest or free association, but of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an oportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman and child is individually targeted, tracked, split off from the rest.. Fragments come together at 'security' only, where a grid of video screens disappointingly reassembles individual frames into a banalized, utilitarian cubism that reveals junkspace's overall coherence to the dispassionate glare of barely trained guards: videoethnography in its brute form. Just as junkspace is unstable, its actual ownership is forever being passed on in parallel disloyalty. Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exhuberance - the unfettered play of the market - or is generated through the combined actions of temporary Czars with long records of three-dimensional philantropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracks of waterfront, former hippodromes, military bases and abandoned airfields to developers or real estate moguls that can accomodate any deficit in futuristic balances, or through 'default preservation'ae (the maintenance of historical complexes that nobody wants but the Zeitgeist has declared sacrosanct). As its scale mushrooms - rivals and even exceeds that of the Public - its economy becomes more inscrutable. Its financing is a deliberate haze, clouding opaque deals, dubious tax breaks, unusual incentives, exemptions, tenuous legalities, transferred air rights, joined properties, special zoning districts, public-private complicities. Funded by bonds, lottery, subsidy, charity, grant: an erratic flow of yen, euros and dollars (Yen€$) creates financial envelopes that are as fragile as their contents. Because of a structural shortfall, a fundamental deficit, a contingent bankruptcy, each square inch becomes a grasping, needy surface dependent on covert or overt support, discount, compensation and fundraising. For culture, 'engraved donor bricks'; for everything else: cash, rentals, leases, promises, chains, the underpinning of brands. Junkspace expands with the economy but its footprint cannot contract... when it is no longer needed, it thins. Because of its tenuous viability, junkspace has to swallow more and more program to survive; soon, we will be able to do anything anywhere. We will have conquered place. At the end ofjunkspace, the Universal?

Through junkspace old aura is tranfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with Guggenheim, 42nd with Disney. A shortage of masters has not stopped a proliferation of masterpieces. Masterpiece has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested, its motives unquestioned... Masterpiece is no longer an inexplicable fluke, a roll of the dice, but a consistent typology: its mission precarious, most of its exterior surfaces bent, huge percentages of its square footage dysfunctional, its centrifugal components barely held together by the pull of the atrium, dreading the imminent arrival of forensic accounting... The more indeterminate the city, the more specific its junkspace; all junkspace's prototypes are urban - the Roman Forum, the Metropolis; it is only their reverse-synergy that makes them suburban, simultaneously swollen and shrunk. Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity...instead of public life, Public Spaceae: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed... space for 'honoring', 'sharing', 'caring', 'grieving' and 'healing'... civility indicated by an overdose of serif.

In the third Millenium, junkspace will assume responsibility for both pleasure and religion, exposure and intimacy, public life and privacy. Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian... at the moment of its greatest emancipation, humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts... from the pushy oration of the waiter, to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is browbeaten to submit to the most harshly engineered plotline... The chosen theater of megalomania - the dictatorial - is no longer politics, but entertainment. Through junkspace, entertainment organizes hermetic regimes of ultimate exclusion and concentration... Concentration gambling, concentration golf, concentration convention, concentration movie, concentration culture, concentration holiday. Entertainment is like watching a once hot planet cool off: its major inventions are ancient: the moving image, the roller coaster, sound, cartoons, clowns, dinosaurs, news, war. Except celebrities - of which there is a dramatic shortage - we have added nothing, just reconfigured. Corpotainment is a galaxy in contraction, forced to go through the motions by ruthless Copernican laws. The secret of corporate aesthetics was the power of elimination, the celebration of the efficient, the eradication of excess: abstraction as camouflage, the search for a corporate sublime. On popular demand, organized beauty has become warm, humanist, inclusivist, arbitrary, poetic and unthreatening: water is pressurized through very small holes, then forced into rigorous hoops; straight palms are bent into grotesque poses, air is burdened with added oxygen - as if only forcing malleable substances into the most drastic contortions maintains control, satisfies the drive to get rid of surprise. Not canned laughter, but canned euphoria.... Color has disappeared to dampen the resulting cacophony, is used only as cue: relax, enjoy, be well, we're united in sedation... why can't we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy? Junkspace heals, or at least that is the assumption of many hospitals. We thought hospitals were unique - a universe indentified by its smell - but now that we are used to universal conditioning we recognize it was merely a prototype; all junkspace is odor-defined. Often heroic in size, planned with the last adrenaline of modernism's grand inspiration, we have made them (too) human; life or death decisions are taken in spaces that are relentlessly friendly, littered by fading bouquets, empty coffee cups and yesterday's papers. You used to face death in appropriate cells, now your nearest are huddled together in atriums. A bold datum line is established on every vertical surface, dividing the infirmiary in two: above an endless humanist scroll of 'color', loved ones, children's sunsets, signage and art... below a utilitarian zone for defacement and disinfectant, anticipated collision, scratch,spill and smudge... Junkspaceis space as vacation; there once was a relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday... The office is the next frontier ofjunkspace. Now that you can work at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become sculptures, the workfloor is lit by intimate downlights. Monumental partitioins, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior plazas: a Post-it universe: 'team memory', 'information persistence'; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement. Witness corporate agit-prop: the CEO's suite becomes 'leadership collective', wired to all the world's other junkspace, real or imagined. Espace becomes e-space. The 21st century will bring 'intelligent' Junkspace: on a big digital 'dashboard': sales, CNNNYSENASDAQC-SPAN, anything that goes up or down, from good to bad, presented in real time like the automotive theory course that complements driving lessons...

Globalization turns language intojunkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrrhic: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism and multitasking... we can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy... Through the industrialization of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated, discoveries remain unmade, concepts unlaunched, philosophies muffled... We inhabit sumptuous Potemkin suburbs of weasel terminologies... Abberant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in their claim to legitimacy, help them survive... Language is no longer used to explore, define, express, or to confront but to fudge, blur, obfuscate, apologize and comfort... it stakes claims, assigns victimhood, preempts debate, admits guilt, fosters consensus. Entire professions impose a descent into the linguistic equivalent of hell: condemned to a word-limbo, inmates wrestle with words in ever descending spirals of pleading, lying, flattening, bargaining ... a Faustian/Satanic orchestration of the meaningless...

Intended for the interior, junkspace can easily engulf a whole city. First, it escapes from its containers - linguistic orchids that needed hothouse protection emerging with surprising robustness - then the outdoors itself is converted: the street is paved more luxuriously, shelters proliferate carrying increasingly dictatorial messages, traffic is calmed, crime eliminated. Then junkspace spreads, consuming nature like a forest fire in LA... The global spread of junkspace represents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space... All the resurrected emblems and recycled ambers of the formerly public, need new pastures. A new vegetal is coralled is for its thematic efficiency. The outing of junkspace has triggered the professionalization of denaturing, a benign ecofacism that positions a rare surviving Siberian tiger in a forest of slot machines, near Armani, amidst an arboreal Baroque... Outside, between the casinos, fountains project entire Stalinist buildings of liquid, ejaculated in a split-second, hovering momentarily, then withdrawn with an amnesiac competency... Air, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce hyperecologyae, a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Landscape has becomejunkspace, foliage as spoilage: trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables... Seemingly at the opposite end of junkspace, the golf course is in fact its conceptual double; empty, serene, free of commercial debris. The relative evacuation of the golf course is achieved by the further charging of junkspace. The methods of their design and realization are similar: erasure, tabula rasa, reconfiguration. Junkspace turns into biojunk; ecology into ecospace. There is only a 31% difference between ecology and economy; in junkspace they have already merged, it is an ecolomy. The economy has become Faustian; hyperdevelopment depends on artificial underdevelopment; a huge global bureaucracy is in the making to settle, in a colossal yin/yang, the balance between junkspace and golf, between the scraped and the scaped, trading the right to despoil for the obligation to create steroid rainforests in Costa Rica. Oxygen banks, Fort Knoxes of chlorophyll, ecoreserves as a blank cheque for further pollution. Junkspace is rewriting the apocalypse; we may die of oxygen poisoning.

The baroque complexities of junkspace were compensated by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures; parking garages, filling stations, distribution centers that routinely displayed a monumental purity that was the original aim of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled infrastructure - the one domain previously immune to design, taste or the marketplace - to join the world of junkspace, and for junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky. Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often neglible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava. (Sometimes when there is a strong wind, this new generation of instruments moves as if it being played by a giant, or maybe a god, and mankind shudders) Junkspace can be airborne, bring malaria to Sussex; 300 anopheline mosquitoes arrive each day at GDG and GTW with the theoretical ability to infect 8 to 20 locals in a 3 mile radius, a hazard exacerbated by the average passenger's reluctance, in a misplaced gasp of quasi-autonomy, to be disinfected once he or she has buckled up for the return journey from the dead-end of the tourist destination. Airports, provisional accommodation for those going elsewhere, inhabited by assemblies united only by the imminence of their dissolution, have turned into consumption gulags, democratically distributed across the globe to give every citizen an equal chance of admission... MXP looks as if all the leftovers of East Germany's reconstruction - whatever was needed to undo the deprivations of Communism - have been hurriedly bulldozed together according to a vaguely rectangular blueprint to form a botched sequence of deformed, inadequate spaces, apparently willed into being by the current rulers of Europe, extorting limitless euros from the community's regional funds, now causing endless delays for its duped taxpayers too busy on mobiles to notice. DFW is composed of three elements only, repeated ad infinitum, nothing else: one kind of beam, one kind of brick, one kind of tile, all coated in the same color - is it teale? rust? tabacco? - its symmetries inflated beyond any recognition, the endless curve of its terminals forces its users to enact relativity theory in their quest for the gate. Its drop-off is the seemingly harmless beginning of a journey to the heart of unmitigated nothingness, beyond animation by Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen...

Valley cultures are the most resistant to junkspace: at GVZ you can still see a universe of rules, order, hierarchy, neatness, coordination, poised moments before its implosion, but at ZHR huge 'timepieces' hover in front of interior waterfalls as an essay in regionaljunk. Duty Free is junkspace, junkspace is duty free space. Where culture was thinnest, will it be the first to run out? Is emptiness local? Do wide open spaces demand wide open junkspace? Sunbelt: huge populations where there was nothing; PHX: warpaint on every terminal, dead Indian outlines on every surface - carpet, wallpaper, napkins - like frogs flattened by car tires. Public Art distributed across LAX: the fish that have disappeared from our rivers return as public art in the concourse; only what is dead can be resurrected. Memory itself may have turned into junkspace; only those murdered will be remembered...

Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage of sterility; both conditions happen in junkspace (often at the same time). Minimum is the ultimate ornament, a self-righteous crime, the contemporary Baroque. It does not signify beauty, but guilt. Its demonstrative earnestness drives whole civilizations in the welcoming arms of camp and kitsch. Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarassment, to lower the higher. Minimum now exists in a state of parasitic co-dependency with overdose: to have and not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed in a single signifier. Museums are sanctimonious junkspace; no sturdier aura than holiness. To entertain the converts they have attracted by default, they massively turn 'bad' space into 'good' space; the more untreated the oak, the larger the profit center. Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores: expansion is the third millenium's entropy, dilute or die. Dedicated to respect mostly the dead, no cemetery would dare to reshuffle corpses as casually in the name of current expediency; curators plot hangings and unexpected encounters in a donor-plate labyrinth with the finesse of the retailer: lingerie becomes 'Death and Survival', cosmetics 'The Human Figure'. All paintings based on black grids are herded together, compressed in a single white room. Large spiders in the humongous conversion offer DT for the masses... Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting... through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepresible attention span, we helplessly register, provide sense, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless... On its triumphal march as content provider, art extends far beyond the museums' ever increasing boundaries. Outside, in the real world, the 'art planner' spreads junkspace's fundamental incoherence by assigning defunct mythologies to residual surfaces and plotting three-dimensional works in left-over emptiness. Scouting for authenticity, their touch seals the fate of what was real, taps it for incorporation in junkspace. Art galleries move en masse to where it is 'edgy', then convert raw space into white cubes... The only legitimate discourse is loss; art replenishes junkspace in direct proportion to its own morbidity. We used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone... Outside, the architects' footbridge is rocked to the breaking point by a stampede of enthusiastic pedestrians; the designers' initial audacity now awaits the engineer's application of dampers. Junkspace is a look-no-hands world...

The constant threat of virtuality in junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real - stone, trees, goods, daylight, people - into the virtual. Entire mountains are dismembered to provide ever greater quantities of authenticity, suspended on precarious brackets, polished to a blinding state of flash that makes the intended realism instantly elusive. Stone only comes in light yellow, flesh, a violent beige, a soapilke green, the colors of communist plastics in the fifties. Forests are felled, their wood is all pale: maybe the origins of junkspace go back to the Kindergarten... ('Origins' is a mint shampoo that stings the anal region). Color in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Color in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible. The average Powerpoint presentation displays sudden bursts of Indian exuberance that junkspace has been the first to translate into realityae, a simulation of virtual vigor. A surfeit of reality TV has made us into amateur guards monitoring a Junkuniverse... From the lively breasts of the classical violinist, the designer stubble of the big-brother outcast, the contextual pedophilia of the former revolutionary, the routine addictions of the stars, the runny makeup of the evangelist, the robotic movements of the conductor, the dubious benefits of the fundraising marathon, the explanation of the politician: the swooping movements of the TV camera suspended from its boom - an eagle without beak or claws, just an optical stomach - swallows images and confessions indiscriminately, like a trashbag, to propel them as cyber-vomit in space. TV studio sets - garishly monumental - are both the culmination and the end of perspectival space as we've known it: angular geometric remnants invading cosmic, starry infinities; real space edited for smooth transmission in virtual space, crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop... the vastness of junkspace extended to infinity. Because we spend our life indoors - like animals in a zoo - we are obsessed with the weather: 40% of all TV consists of presenters of lesser atrractiveness gesturing helplessly in front of of windswept formations, through which you recognize, sometimes, your own destination / current position. Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors...

Mankind is always going on about architecture. What if space started looking at mankind? Will junkspace invade the body? Through the vibes of the mobile? Has it already? Botox injections? Collagen? Silicone implants? Liposuction? Penis enlargements? Does gene therapy announce a total reengineering according to junkspace? Is each of us a mini-construction site? Mankind the sum of 3-5 billion individual upgrades? Is it a repertoire of reconfiguration that facilitates the intromission of a new species into its self-made Junkbiosphere?

God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing... an insulting evolutionary joke...

The cosmetic is the new cosmic.

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